Tag Archives: Tamay Özgökmen

A team of scientists and filmmakers at the Rosenstiel School won top prize in the Ocean 180 Challenge for their video “Drones on the Beach” and placed in the top 10 for their video about ocean currents, “Bob the Drifter.”

Watch the award-winning video:

To read the corresponding science publication on drone technology used in oil spill research, click here.

The videos were created by the Waterlust team, which includes Ph.D. student Patrick Rynne and alumna Fiona Graham and Jennah Caster. Both videos were based on CARTHE ((Consortium for Advanced Research on the Transport of Hydrocarbon in the Environment) research. CARTHE is a Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative consortia based at the Rosenstiel School.

37,795 middle school students judges in over 1,600 classrooms in 21 countries selected the top entries. These students were responsible for critiquing and evaluating the finalists based on their creativity, message, and educational value.

Watch “Bob the Drifter”

The Florida Center for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence (COSEE Florida) hosts the annual Ocean 180 Video Challenge, which aims to engage non-scientists and students in timely and relevant ocean science research while inspiring scientists to effectively share their discoveries and excitement for research with the public. For more on the Ocean 180 video Challenge, click here.

The University of Miami was awarded two Outstanding Achievement awards by the Interactive Media Council for excellence in the design, development and implementation of the CARTHE website. Based at the UM Rosenstiel School, the Consortium for Advanced Research on Transport of Hydrocarbon in the Environment (CARTHE) is a research team dedicated to predicting the fate of the oil released into our environment as a result of future oil spills.

The CARTHE website launched in August 2013 and serves as a web portal devoted to interactive information and science education for scientists, students, members of the press and the general public. The CARTHE website was created in collaboration with Professor Kim Grinfeder and his team from the UM School of Communications.

“The idea of this website was conceived when I met Kim Grinfeder from the School of Communication at a workshop I attended on main campus,” said Tamay Özgökmen, CARTHE director and Rosenstiel School professor.

“We needed an interactive website to tell our complex scientific story. Over the course of the next few months, we conceived the website, which had two main interactive elements: An interactive infographic through which visitors can get information about the project, and a main introductory video on the homepage,” said Professor Özgökmen.

The CARTHE videos were developed by Ali Habashi, faculty member in the UM School of Communication’s Department of Cinema and Interactive Media.

“Ali was recommended to me by three different, unrelated people within a week. His name came up repeatedly when I said that it would be most efficient to have a video to tell our complex scientific story within the time span of a few minutes; people would say “Will Ali do it?” He has a great reputation within the UM community and beyond,” said Professor Özgökmen.

“What I liked most about this project was its cross-disciplinary aspect and how it really shows how different areas of UM can collaborate,” said Kim Grinfeder, associate professor in the UM Department of Cinema and Interactive Media. “CARTHE is an amazing project happening at our university and to learn about their work and to have the opportunity to tell their story was an incredible experience.”

“There are plenty of benefits that can come from bringing faculty members from different schools together, and the CARTHE website is one example,” said Professor Özgökmen.

The judging consisted of various criteria, including design, usability, innovation in technical features, standards compliance and content. The website won in two categories, Science/Technology and Natural Environment/Green. It has received 4,583 visits since its launch in August 2013.

Researchers from the UM Rosenstiel School are in Florida’s Panhandle this week and next to study how oil and other pollutants migrate in the Gulf of Mexico. Information collected by scientists from the CARTHE experiments will be used to model the transport of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, in the event of a future spill.

For the three-week experiment, begun last week and called SCOPE – Surfzone Coastal Oil Pathways Experiment – scientists are deploying GPS-equipped drifters and other advanced instruments to track ocean currents off Ft. Walton Beach and better understand how oil may move onshore in the event of a future spill.

“In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill it became clear that understanding the ocean currents in the surf zone is vital to improve our understanding and prediction of oil spills,” said UM professor Tamay Özgökmen, director of the Consortium for Advanced Research on Transport of Hydrocarbons in the Environment (CARTHE). “There are catastrophic socio-economic impacts when oil spills reach our beaches.”

UM’s Ad Reniers and his colleague Jamie MacMahan, from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., are deploying a variety of instruments, including 200 GPS-equipped drifters, unmanned aerial vehicles, and pressure and dye sensors at and below the surface at varying depths, to measure the movement of coastal ocean currents and determine how they carry oil, fish larvae, or toxins close to shore.

“This study will collect important data necessary to understand the ocean currents in the near-shore marine environment,” said Reniers, associate professor of applied marine physics at the Rosenstiel School and lead SCOPE investigator. “The information collected will be used to develop computer models of the coastal zone to improve our scientific understanding of this region in the event of a future oil spill, as well as to better understand how larvae or water pollutants travel close to shore.”

The research was made possible by a grant from the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI), a 10-year, $500 million independent research program established by an agreement between BP and the Gulf of Mexico Alliance to study the effects of the Deepwater Horizon accident and the potential associated impact of this and similar incidents on the environment and public health.

SCOPE is the second large experiment conducted by CARTHE, bringing together a wide range of scientific experts and experiments to study oil spills.

The SCOPE Experiment is a project of the UM-based CARTHE. The CARTHE program includes 26 principal investigators from 12 research institutions in eight states. Together these scientists are engaged in novel research through the development of a suite of integrated models and state-of-the-art computations that bridge the scale gap between existing models and natural processes.

“Our goal is to provide visitors with an enhanced interactive experience when they are looking for information about our program and our research on ocean currents – whether they are a scientist, student, member of the press or member of the general public,” said Dr. Tamay Ozgokmen, CARTHE Director and Rosenstiel School Professor. “We are doing significant, innovative research with investigators from 14 institutions through CARTHE, and are excited to share our findings with the public.”

The CARTHE site’s new, streamlined design is clutter free, and was created in collaboration with Professor Kim Grinfeder and his team from the UM School of Communication. It offers improved navigation, links to social media resources, videos of experts, computer animations, and prominently features major news items on the home page, as well as an engaging overview video that serves as a welcome to the site.

Researchers from around the country came together at the Mayfair Hotel in Coconut Grove, Fla. this week to kick off the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative-funded Consortium for Advanced Research on the Transport of Hydrocarbons in the Environment (CARTHE). The GoMRI Research Board was an independent body established by BP to administer the company’s 10-year, $500 million commitment to independent research into the effects of the Deepwater Horizon incident.

Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science Professor Tamay Özgökmen and lead Director of CARTHE initiative address the crowd.

The goal of CARTHE is to develop and improve computational tools to accurately predict the fate of hydrocarbons found in crude oil that are released into the environment, and help to guide risk management and response efforts in mitigation and restoration of the economy and the ecosystem in situations like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The Director of CARTHE initiative is UM Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science Professor Tamay Özgökmen, who hosted the meeting.

Twelve universities and research institutions distributed across four Gulf States and in four other states are represented on CARTHE. Chuck Wilson, GRI Chief Science Officer and Kevin Shaw, the Program Manager for the project attended the meeting, and were joined by 65 oceanographic modelers, observational scientists, biologist and chemists. The group shared presentations, participated in plenary sessions, and met in breakout groups.

Twelve universities and research institutions distributed across four Gulf States and in four other states are represented on CARTHE

The effort of CARTHE is complementary to that by seven other consortia in perhaps the largest coordinated oceanographic research effort in recent decades. CARTHE meeting was very productive, with plans being refined on how to peace together a series of hydrodynamic model to span an unprecedented range of spatio-temporal scales of motion in the ocean, and on how to carry out the largest dispersion experiment to be ever conducted in the ocean.